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I don't really understand what you are getting at, your points seem sort of disjointed. The comment I was responding to asked "Why can't this work in the US", a

I don't really understand what you are getting at, your points seem sort of disjointed. The comment I was responding to asked "Why can't this work in the US", and I don't think anything you've said refutes my point that Ronald Reagan's presidency is responsible for the shift in attitudes against public participation and enthusiasm for public works and administration. There is no doubt that the New Deal platform was becoming somewhat wasteful toward the end of its' era, but it was still serving the broader public. Post-Reagan the government has been far less involved in directing the economy toward the benefit of the majority, and the conservative movement he fostered has worked tireless to ensure people don't trust the government to do anything.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The problem was that by the time of Reagan, corruption had already taken root and was diverting the money from useful public purposes to the pockets of anybody with a good lobbyist. Contemporary example: Instead of having the government build new housing developments and then sell them into the market, any it does build are designated as "affordable housing" with restricted access to limit their impact on the market price of housing, i.e. to keep them from actually making housing more affordable. Meanwhile there are rental subsidies that don't increase the housing stock and thereby primarily benefit landlords. How do you fix this when the problem is powerful lobbyists capable of unseating politicians who try? Reagan never solved this. Government spending didn't really go down. The theory ("starve the beast") was that if they lowered taxes, the tax reduction would be sticky (because people like that) and then the budget crunch would cause politicians to have to trim the pork. But the cuts never happened. The lobbyists were too strong. So now we just run bigger deficits. Nobody has ever solved the problem. If you give the modern US government a dollar, it goes to building tanks the army doesn't want or inflating the cost of healthcare, because those industries have strong lobbyists. To get it to go to building dams or meaningfully increasing the housing stock or anything like that, you not only have to fight Lockheed Martin for the dollar, you also have to fight the coal lobby who don't want more hydro, or the National Association of Realtors who don't want lower housing costs. If you can't answer how to solve that, you can't get publicly beneficial government projects. And what we get instead is very expensive trash.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

The problem was that by the time of Reagan, corruption had already taken root and was diverting the money from useful public purposes to the pockets of anybody with a good lobbyist. Contemporary example: Instead of having the government build new housing developments and then sell them into the market, any it does build are designated as "affordable housing" with restricted access to limit their impact on the market price of housing, i.e. to keep them from actually making housing more affordable. Meanwhile there are rental subsidies that don't increase the housing stock and thereby primarily benefit landlords. How do you fix this when the problem is powerful lobbyists capable of unseating politicians who try? Reagan never solved this. Government spending didn't really go down. The theory ("starve the beast") was that if they lowered taxes, the tax reduction would be sticky (because people like that) and then the budget crunch would cause politicians to have to trim the pork. But the cuts never happened. The lobbyists were too strong. So now we just run bigger deficits. Nobody has ever solved the problem. If you give the modern US government a dollar, it goes to building tanks the army doesn't want or inflating the cost of healthcare, because those industries have strong lobbyists. To get it to go to building dams or meaningfully increasing the housing stock or anything like that, you not only have to fight Lockheed Martin for the dollar, you also have to fight the coal lobby who don't want more hydro, or the National Association of Realtors who don't want lower housing costs. If you can't answer how to solve that, you can't get publicly beneficial government projects. And what we get instead is very expensive trash.